First comprehensive up-to-date account of a major historical subject little known to the public in English language

After the war, Ishii Shiro fled to the US for asylum with his gruesome data to escape from prosecution of crimes against humanity – Unit 731’s bacteriological experiments were then unleashed in the Korean War

Profusely illustrated with many unpublished photographs

Inspired the infamous Man Behind the Sun (1988), which is banned in many countries for its graphic content of human experimentation

When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, one man saw the opportunity not for profit or territorial gain, but for the beginnings of his own terrible bid for glory. It was here that Japanese military physician Ishii Shiro established Unit 731, Japan’s covert biological and chemical weapons research division.

Unit 731 began a programme of human experimentation barely rivalled by the Nazis in their death camps for its sheer brutality and unprecedented scale. For more than a decade, Ishii’s scientists murdered more than 3,000 living subjects in the name of the Empire. These human experiments are the most gruesome ever committed in their scale and suffering.

Chinese, Russians and Koreans were subjected to aerial bombardments of plague and anthrax, frozen and stripped of flesh, and gassed and boiled alive.

Also, British and American prisoners of war were dissected while alive without aesthetic. Ishii’s prisoners were not human: they were ‘muratas’ or ‘logs’.

However, the physician was not persecuted for crimes against humanity and Ishii died unrepentant in 1959, his ‘Laboratory of the Devil’ criminally neglected.

Now, Yan-jun Yang, who is the deputy director at the Unit 731 Museum in Harbin, China, unearths what went on in the Eastern Auschwitz and exposes the atrocities in Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil, Auschwitz of the East.

BOOK ISBN

9781781556788

FORMAT

234 x 156 mm

BINDING

Hardback

PAGES

160 pages

PUBLICATION DATE

10 May 2018

TERRITORY

World

ILLUSTRATIONS

48 black-and-white photographs

Professor Yan-Jun Yang is the director of International Center for Unit 731 Research, Harbin Academy of Social Sciences, and deputy curator of the Unit 731 Museum. He has been engaged in Unit 731 research for twelve years and has travelled to America, Japan, Germany, Poland, and other countries for academic research and exchanges.

Professor of history at Macalester College (US), Yue-Him Tam is a specialist in Japanese history and Sino-Japanese relations. He has taught the course ‘War Crimes and Memory in East Asia’ for over fifteen years. An author of many acclaimed publications on cultural interactions between China and Japan, Yue-him was also president of the San Francisco-based Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War Two in Asia.